Finally Intel gets a slap on the wrist!

Hardware Hub Tech Policy & News
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The General Court of the European Union has dismissed the appeal of Intel against the 2009 sentence for the violations against the free market regulations Intel has committed from 2000-2004.

For those interested in the long version: http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2014-06/cp140082en.pdf

The Court gives Intel a hefty rebate on the full fine of over 37 billion Euros it had coming given the extent and tenacity of the free market violations, and Intel only has to pay 1.06 Billion Euros in fines.

This settles the procedure that started with several formal complaints of AMD to the European Commission since the year 2000. Initially, the Commission had given Intel several years time to stop violating the free market regulations, but since Intel refused to comply, the Commission started formal judicial proceedings in 2007. In 2009, Intel was sentenced, and this verdict by the General Court seals the last appeal, which makes the decision final.

Of course there will be retaliations by the corporate US government, but they didn't have a lot of success with those lately. For refusing to waive the European consumer protection and human rights in dealing with US corporations in the fifth failed round of the TTP negotiations a couple of weeks ago, "mysteriously" Emirates cancelled their 70 Airbus 350 orders. That constitutes only 8 % of the order book for that type of airplane from Airbus Industries for a delivery in 2019, so it won't have any real effect on Airbus Industries, which mainly makes other aircraft models, but at the same time, it constitutes more than 4% of the total order book of UK-based Rolls Royce, and that is quite a big hit for that company. So the retaliation didn't hit Continental Europe, but it did hit the UK, making the retaliation attempt a flagrant case of friendly fire of the US against the UK.

Other recent retaliations that hold no ground, were the wave of fines the US government charged to Continental European banks for executing banking transactions to Cuba, Iran and Liberia. As these are not US banks, these fines are unenforceable, and there is no reason for Continental European banks to refuse transactions to and from these countries, that often show more respect for the European citizens than the US government and institutions... the only effect these bogus fines may have, is that European institutions that buffer the entire exploding financial deficit in the US (from companies like Euroclear that absorb a huge amount of the deficits from creditcard companies in the US to business banks that absorb the huge deficits of the US and UK corporate banking sector), will reduce their activities of saving the Anglo-American financial world from the de facto bankruptcy it has gotten itself in.

So get ready for another wave of corporate pay-to-retaliate action from the US government. If Intel doesn't comply, they risk a complete product ban from the EU and they risk their assets in Europe to be seized.

Let's all hope Intel finally learns their lesson. I highly doubt it, but there's always hope. I think Intel will not only retaliate by pay-to-retaliate US government actions, but will also close several affiliates in Continental Europe, and will sack as many people as possible. That would be good news for AMD and all kinds of RISC manufacturers, they would certainly like to hire the ex-Intel people. It would also weaken Intel's position in the EU market, where Microsoft is already having so much problems. Maybe this constitutes the last straw of the grip of the Wintel alliance on the European market, in which case, good riddance...

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Read an article on the BBC a few hours ago about this and never really thought about the bigger picture. That's some awesome insight and will be good for the market in the long run (especially if AMD do release new FX series CPUs soon and they're good) as monopolistic tyrants such as Intel will (hopefully) reduce prices due to more competition and have bigger jumps in preformance from generation to generation (such as 20%-30% instead of the rather meagre 9%-11% since Sandy Bridge) which should improve competition even more. Don't get me wrong - I like both AMD and Intel and own CPUs from both companies which fail to disappoint but also fail to impress massively.

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I'm late to the party, so Intel was being monopolistic?

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Intel have followed the same pricing scheme throughout the entire core series, regardless of the competition. So don't expect any kind of lowering prices.

 

Also if Intel lowered their prices, wouldn't that be bad news for AMD? AMD are already forced to lower the prices on their processor, if Intel lowered their by lets say 20%, the current FX series would be doomed.

 

You really expect 20-30% performance increase from each update? Hell no, this is impossible for every company. Intel is focusing on other markets, just like AMD are.

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tres interesting... thanks for sharing the article

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While you are probably right on the whole "they [AMD] would certainly like to hire the ex-Intel people." surely there would be some corporate secrets clause that does not let them work for the competitor for a period of a few years directly after leaving/being fired from Intel.

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i think in order for this to be enforceable they would have to continue to pay them. this is the case in the finance industry. that's why there are gardening leave periods and such.

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Anyone who was around during the Pentium 4 days won't find this hard to believe. Back then, nearly every OEM machine ran an Intel. That may not seem odd these days, but back then AMD's Athlon 64 processors were so much better than anything Intel offered. They were more efficient, priced competitively, and much, much faster. The performance gap between AMD and Intel was even bigger than it is now, but it was in AMD's favor. These anti-competitive practices cost AMD billions and, since so few people even came in contact with an AMD machine, lead the general public to believe that Intel was better. The fine should be much larger. This continues to effect the CPU market now. The "Intel Inside" mindset has never changed for the general public. Intel was able to pump the money that they swindled from AMD into R&D, and after a few years, the rest was history. They launched the Core 2 Duo, which finally brought them to parity with AMD's processors, and then some. AMD has been able to hang in there with small improvements each generation, but Intel has still gained a bigger lead every year. Imagine how different things would be now if AMD had had that much money for R&D.

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for longer than you'd first guess. They even payed review sites to favor netbursts instead of athlon 64

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I agree that the fine should have been much higher. They got of with a warning basically, and they nearly destroyed AMD, and, what's more important, they stole from consumers big time for years.

AMD has never screwed up products that bad like Intel in the Pentium IV and Pentium D days. The Wintel alliance has really done very bad things since the late 90's, for which they were never held accountable in the US, and THAT still continues to this day.

AMD has just announced that they split up their operation into two separate departments, one for the enterprise-embedded-semicustom business, which is hugely successful, and which will be further lead by Lisa Su, and one for the compute/graphics department, which will be further lead by John Byrne. Both of them will report to CEO Rory Read.

Su's server/tablets/consoles market is growing for AMD. Byrne's PC market - choked to death by the Wintel alliance as it is - is the most difficult market, even though AMD's market share has grown proportionally over recent years.

Of course this split is just a split of the marketing and sales vehicle that AMD as a company has become. In reality, most of the research, design and manufacturing operations have already been shifted to the mother company ATIC, that also owns the GlobalFoundries fabs.

AMD was saved by the fact that the major part of their operations was saved by ATIC. ATIC is a subsidiary of the country of Abu Dhabi, one of the Emirates, that gets it's money mainly from oil. The CEO of ATIC is Sanjay Jha, the most remunerated CEO in the USA, who before that was CEO of Motorola until Google bought it, and before that COO of Qualcomm, where he started as chip designer for mobile phones. Kinda puts everything in an interesting perspective.

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Well, intel users. You know whats gonna happen next. They are going to pass the savings on to the customer ( so to speak) in some way.

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Finally, it seems that the American corporate mentality that profit justifies playing dirty, dirty doesn't work too well in the EU.

And according to this:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/record-e1-06-billion-fine-against-intel-upheld-by-eu-court/

Intel has already paid the fine in 2009, so the prices won't be increased. And they can still appeal to the European Court of Justice within 70 days of this verdict.

I wonder if what Intel has done is any different from what NVIDIA is doing with the GameWorks program, making it hard to impossible for AMD to suggest improvements in the game code.

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Well hopefully AMD can get money out of PS4 and Xbox One. Here is how I see it. AMD was top dog prior to 2007. In 2006 Intel cpus were license to the Xbox 360 which allowed for a huge income. A huge income leads to better R&D. Only problem is I know a lot of people who will refuse to buy into the newer consoles as they arent in the 200 - 300 price range as consoles should be. Consoles are supposed to be that price due to their software and hardware limitations. You cant upgrade the software or hw without voiding the warranties on the devices.

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They didn't pay the fine, the fine was reserved. Now it should be perceived by the Commission.

They can only appeal for matters that are relevant to the European Court of Justice. Intel knows that it won't help their case to appeal, but they're not afraid of wasting customers' money, so they might appeal anyway.

There are a lot of US companies that don't get the concept of human rights and consumer rights. When I heard some jackass on Leo Laporte's show talking about the European decision to force Google to respect the rights of consumers with regards to their data, I realized that not only companies don't understand the concept of freedom and equality, but that the corporate corruption and inequality is taken for granted, and that festers a lot of intolerance and aggression because it goes against human nature.

I can't help but hearing yet another version of Mussolini's "Carrot and stick" speech whenever I hear Americans talk about business and politics. I don't get it, because it stands in such shrill contrast to the "in your face" attitude Americans display everywhere. Talking about advertising vaporware and living with unhappiness... that just happens if you stop fighting for your rights in return for some idle entertainment.

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AMD's new slogan: AMD Onboard......

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Yeah, I was pissed off with the Anglo-American media response to the Right to Privacy. So much speculation, and very little detail. I'm actually ashamed to live in the UK, and I would quite like to brush up on my German and move to the continent.

The 4th amendment of the US constitution is supposed to protect personal correspondence, and yet, nobody in the US wants to protect themselves in this digital age. They are still debating net neutrality! Land of the free to be ignorant.

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While you are probably right on the whole "they [AMD] would certainly like to hire the ex-Intel people.

All the guys n girls at AMD/intel all used to work for IBM back in the day before AMD/intel existed its not like these most of these guys dont know each outher or havent worked with each outher before.

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It's very easy to gauge how much Americans value their rights and their privacy: look at the large masses of youtubers who were outraged (outraged, I say!) with the NSA spying on them. Now look at how many of them gave up on using Windows.

Very informative, I would say.

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I still use Windows, but I do use services that encrypt my web use. If gaming was more mature on Linux, I would make the move.

From a political stand point, I can see which countries are failing to do anything about this nonsense.

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Well this thread is only about Microsoft insofar it was definitely instrumental in the Intel scam. We don't want to go into the huge scams Microsoft and Bill Gates get into. Like how Bill Gates continuously defends the Common Core in the US, insofar the Common Core revolves around making students use Dell Tablets locked to Microsoft software... yeah right! Bill Gates' own children go to a private school that doesn't follow the Common Core Standards of course...

The reality is that the captains of industry do not only kill citizens in other countries to get their hands on oil, and sacrifice a lot of American lives in the process, but they also corrupt the children of the US citizens. What should normal people do when someone is trying to corrupt and brainwash their children? And... is there any reaction whatsoever... no!... because they drug their children to keep them quit, so that they can enjoy their Netflix, and they are glad that the corporations take on them the "Beschäftigungstherapie" of their children, and with that, also the "Beschäftigungstherapie" of the parents.

People in the US just don't want to be diverted from all the entertainment, they are so hooked on the corporate panem et circenses that they just don't see reality any more, but they feel it in their subconscience, a subconscience that is wildly rioting, which is what festers the hatred, violence and intolerance, because that's what happens when under-educated people are forced to live in a way that's contrary to the human nature, which is to determine one's own fate, to have the freedom to make one's own choices, to have equal rights, etc...

But I don't even want to get started on Microsoft's and Google's "business models"... makes me think of the "stick and carrot" speech of Mussolini and the "Lebensraum" speech of Hitler too much, and I find those very offensive and they whole thing ruins my mood lol